The Last of Us Part I

The Last of Us is one of the most multi-threaded PC games to date, can use up to 16 CPU threads


These past couple of days I’ve been benchmarking the PC version of The Last of Us Part I, and our PC Performance Analysis article will go live this weekend. However, here is something special for you. From the looks of it, The Last of Us Part I is the most multi-threaded PC game to date.

For our tests, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 531.41 drivers.

For our CPU benchmarks, we’ll be using the Prologue sequence. This sequence has a lot of NPCs, and can stress both the CPU and the GPU. We’ll be also using the game’s Max Settings, though we’ve lowered our resolution to 720p (in order to avoid any possible GPU bottleneck).

For our initial tests, we disabled the second CCD of the 7950X3D. And I was really shocked when I first benchmarked the game. You see, The Last of Us Part I stressed all of the CPU cores of our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D’s CCD0. Then I decided to enable SMT (Hyper-Threading for Intel users), and I couldn’t really believe my eyes. The Last of Us Part I is the only game that can actually take advantage of 16 CPU threads. That’s insane.

TLOU 16 CPU threads

And for our ultimate test, we enabled SMT on both our CCDs (so now we’re looking at 32 threads). And, as we can see, the game can indeed scale up to 15-16 CPU threads.

TLOU 32 CPU threads

The Last Of Us Part I CPU scaling

Now I’m not saying that the game justifies its CPU requirements (we’ll talk about this in our upcoming analysis article). However, it’s incredible witnessing its engine taking advantage of more than 10 CPU threads.

As we’ve already reported, Naughty Dog has released the second PC hotfix for the game. Furthermore, owners of 16GB of RAM will encounter major performance issues. That is, obviously, if you target Ultra Settings. Take a look at one of the images above. Without anything running in the background, our total RAM usage was above 16GB. And that was at 720p. Ouch.

Stay tuned for more!